Homecomings (2 page)

It could not have gone well. It might have gone a little better, I sometimes thought, if we had had children, which each of us longed for. But we were left with nothing but ourselves.

‘I must get it out,’ she said, staring long-sightedly at the board. With two fingers she touched a piece shaped like a howdahed elephant, which in a European set would have been a castle. Out of anxious habit, my glance fixed, not on the strong broad-tipped fingers, but on the nails. Once again that night I was relieved. Though they were not painted, they were clean and trimmed. There had been times when her sense of deprivation froze her into stupor, when she no longer took care of herself. That frightened me, but it had not happened for some years. Usually she dressed well enough, and as she walked by the embankment pubs or along the King’s Road, people saw a woman with her head high, a muscular stride, a face handsome and boldly made up.

‘You’d better start again systematically,’ I said.

‘Teach me,’ said Sheila.

It was like her to be willing to take a lesson in the theory of chess problems. It was like her also not to have asked a single question about what I had been doing, although she had not seen me for four days. Cambridge, my London job, they did not exist for her. From before our marriage, from the time when she no longer hoped that all would come well for her, she had become more shut up within herself. In fact, trying to look after her, I had broken my career.

When I married, I thought I knew what it would be like. I should have to watch over her dreads; I had seen something of the schizoid chill; I could imagine how tasks trivial to the rest of us were ordeals to her, how any arrangement in the future, even the prospect of going to a dinner party, could crack her nerves. But I had been borne along by passionate love for her, physical passion pent up for years, and perhaps more than that. So I went into it, and, like others before me,soon knew that no imaginative forecast of what a life will be is anything like that life lived from day to day.

I did my best for her. It scarcely helped her at all. But it left me without much energy free. When we married, I had just got a foot in at the Bar, I was being thought of as a rising junior. Unless I parted from Sheila, I could not keep up that struggle. And so I found less strenuous jobs, a consulting one with Paul Lufkin’s firm and a law fellowship at Cambridge, the latter taking me away from the Chelsea house three or four nights a week. When she was at her most indrawn, sitting by her gramophone for hours on end, I was glad, although it was a cowardly relief, to get away.

That February evening, as we sat opposite each other at the chess table in the bright room, I thought of none of these things. It was quite enough that she seemed content. It gave me – what sometimes can exist in the unhappiest of marriages, although an outsider does not realize its power – a kind of moral calm. Habit was so strong that it could wipe away ambitions put aside, crises of choice, a near-parting, all that had gone on in my secret life with her: habit was sitting near her, watching her nails, watching for the tic, the pseudo-smile, that came when strain was mastering her.

‘I saw RSR today,’ she said out of the blue.

‘Did you?’

‘I’ve got an idea he was looking for me.’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ I said.

‘We had a drink. He was in good form.’

Once that would have been a way to provoke my jealousy. Not now. I welcomed anything that would give her interest or hope. She still had bursts of activity in which she lost herself – once or twice, for those were the thirties, in politics; but usually in trying to help some lame dog whom she had met by chance. A little backstreet café where she went by herself – I found that she had lent the proprietor money to keep on the lease. A derelict curate, terrified that he was going to be prosecuted – she was on call for him at any time he wanted. Utterly uninterested in my goings on, her family’s, her old friends’, she could still become absorbed in those of someone new. With them she was selfless, they gave her a flash of hope, she became like the young woman I had first known.

‘He began to talk very airily about getting himself financed again,’ said Sheila.

‘He’s not losing any time, is he?’

‘I wonder if I could do anything for him,’ she said.

‘Plenty of people have tried, you know,’ I said.

It was true. I had only met R S Robinson once; he was a man of sixty, who before 1914 had made a reputation as the editor of an avant-garde monthly. Since then, he had been a hanger-on of letters, ghosting for agents, bringing out uncommercial magazines, losing money, making enemies, always ready with a new project. It was not long since he had manoeuvred an introduction to Sheila; the manoeuvres had been elaborate, he might as well have shouted out loud that he had heard she was well-off.

‘Yes, plenty have tried,’ she said. ‘So much the worse for them.’

She gave me a realistic jeering smile. She always met her down-and-outs with her eyes open. She added: ‘But that isn’t much comfort for him, is it?’

‘But if other people have got involved,’ I said, some second-hand rumour running through my mind, ‘it isn’t encouraging for you.’

‘You’ve heard things against him?’

‘Of course.’

‘I expect,’ said Sheila, ‘
he’s
heard things against me.’

She gave a curious mocking laugh, almost brazen-sounding, a sign that her hopes were high. It was a long time since I had seen them so.

‘Perhaps even against you,’ she said.

I smiled back, I could not depress her; at moments like this her spirits could still make mine spring from the earth. But I said: ‘I tell you, he’s run through plenty of well-wishers. There must be something the matter.’

‘Of course there’s something the matter. If not,’ she said, ‘he wouldn’t have any use for me.’ Again she smiled: ‘Look, it’s those with something the matter who need someone. I should have thought even you might have grasped that by now.’

She stood up, went over to the fireplace, grasped the mantelpiece and arched her back.

‘We’re all right for money, aren’t we?’ she asked. Just for once, she, who usually spoke so nakedly, was being disingenuous. She knew our financial state as well as I did. She would not have been her father’s daughter otherwise. Actually, prepared to throw money away as she was, she had a shrewd business head. She knew exactly just how much money need not trouble us. With my earnings and her income, we drew in more than two thousand a year, and lived well within it, even though we kept up this comfortable home and had a housekeeper to look after us.

I nodded yes, we were all right.

‘That’s one thing settled then.’

‘As long,’ I said, ‘as you’re not going to be too disappointed–’

‘I don’t expect too much.’

‘You mustn’t expect anything,’ I said.

‘But he is a gifted man, isn’t he?’ cried Sheila, her face softer and less worn.

‘I think he is,’ I said.

‘I might be able to get him going again,’ she said.

She went on, wistfully and yet with something like bravado: ‘That would be
something
. If I haven’t done anything else, that would be something, wouldn’t it?’

ON the track of someone she might serve, Sheila worked as fast as a confidence trickster. It must have been that same week, probably the very next day, that R S Robinson came to dine. Certainly I arrived straight from Lufkin’s office; for long afterwards the juxtaposition struck me as ironic.

I had spent all day in Lufkin’s suite. To begin, he had asked me to be available in the early morning and had then kept me waiting, which was not unusual, for a couple of hours. Outside his office, in an ante-room so thickly carpeted that men walked through it with no noise at all, I passed the time with the member of Lufkin’s entourage whom I knew best, a man of my own age called Gilbert Cooke. He was a kind of personal assistant to Lufkin, in theory giving advice on export problems, just as in theory I gave advice on legal ones; but in practice Lufkin used us both as utility men. The company was one of the smaller oil-businesses, but the smallness was relative, and in 1938, the fourth year of Lufkin’s chairmanship, he had already a turnover of thirty million pounds. He had also his own legal staff, and when he offered me a consultant’s job he did not want another lawyer; but it suited him to pick up young men like me and Cooke, keep them on call, and then listen to them.

In the ante-room, Gilbert Cooke pointed to the office door.

‘He’s running behind time,’ he said, as though Lufkin were a train. Cooke was fleshy, powerfully muscled, with a high-coloured Corinthian face and hot brown eyes; he gave at once an impression of intimacy, kindness and considerable weight of nature. In fact, he spoke as though we were more intimate than we actually were.

‘How is Sheila just now?’ he asked me while he waited, as though he knew the whole history.

I said she was well, but he was not put off.

‘Are you absolutely sure she’s been to the right doctor?’ he said.

I said she had not been near one for some time.

‘Who did she go to?’

He was intrusive, pressing, but kind: it was hard to remember that he had only been inside our house twice. He had taken me often enough to his clubs, we had talked politics and games and Lufkin’s business, but I had not given him a confidence.

At last we were shown into Lufkin’s office: in that suite, as one moved from room to room, the air wafted against the skin like warm breath.

Lufkin sat up straight in a hard chair. He scarcely greeted us: he was inconsiderate, but also informal and without pomp. He was off-hand in personal relations because he was so bad at them, and yet, perversely, they gave him pleasure.

‘You know the point?’ he said.

Yes, we had both been briefed.

‘What do I do?’

It sounded as though we should have finished in ten minutes. In actuality, it took all day, and nothing we said mattered much. Lufkin sat there, indifferent to time, straight, bony, skull-faced. He was only ten years older than Cooke or me; his skin was dark, and his business enemies put it about that he looked Jewish and that his name was Jewish, while as a matter of fact his father was a nonconformist parson in East Anglia.

The point before us was simple enough. He had been asked whether he wanted to buy another distributing business; should he? From the beginning of the talk, throughout the long, smoky, central-heated, unromantic hours, two things stood out. First, this was a point on which neither Cooke’s judgement nor mine was worth much – certainly no more than that of any moderately intelligent man round the office. Second, I was sure that, whatever we or anyone else argued, Lufkin had already made up his mind to buy.

Yet all day Cooke behaved like a professional no-man. He became argumentative and rude, oddly so for a middle-rank employee in the presence of a tycoon. The tone of the discussion was harsh and on the whole impersonal; the arguments were prosaic. Cooke was loquacious, much more than Lufkin or me: he went on pestering, not flattering: as I listened, I knew that he was closer to Lufkin than most people in the firm, and wondered why.

Most of the men Lufkin bought had a bit of professional success behind them; but Cooke had nothing to show but social connexions, except for his own curious kind of personal force.

Once, in the middle of the afternoon, after we had lunched on sandwiches and coffee, Cooke switched from his factual line. Suddenly, staring at Lufkin with his full eyes, he said: ‘I’m afraid you’re liable to overstretch yourself.’

‘Maybe.’ Lufkin seemed willing to consider the idea.

‘I mean, with any empire
like yours
’ – their eyes met, and Lufkin smiled bleakly – ‘there comes a time when you’ve got to draw in your horns, or else–’

‘What do you say to that, Eliot?’

I said that the firm was short of men, and that the able men were spread thin. He ought to acquire a dozen future managers before he bought much more.

‘I agree that,’ he said. For half-an-hour he got down to detail, and then asked: ‘That make you feel any better, Cooke?’

‘No, it seems easy to you, but it’s not easy.’

‘What seems easy?’

‘Biting off more than anyone can chew.’

Underneath his remote, off-hand manner, Lufkin was obscurely gratified. But he had a knack of pushing away his own gratification, and we returned to figures again.

The sky outside the office windows darkened, the air seemed more than ever hot. Nothing was settled. There had scarcely been a flight of fancy all day. No one would have guessed, though it was the truth, that Lufkin was a man of remarkable imagination; nor that this marathon talk was his technique of coming to the point of action; nor that Gilbert Cooke was swelling with pride, ardent but humble, at being in on anything so big.

When at last we parted, it was nearly seven and still nothing was settled. The whole range of facts about the new business had been re-sorted, except the purchase price, which Lufkin had only mentioned once, and then obliquely. ‘There’s always money for a good business,’ he had added indifferently, and passed on. And yet that purchase price gave a tang to the repetitive, headachey hours, the only tang I was left with on the way to Chelsea in the cold taxi, for it could not have been less than a million pounds.

When I reached home, I met a different kind of business method. R S Robinson was already there in the drawing-room; he was standing plumply by the fire, soft silver-shining hair venerable above smooth baby skin. He looked comfortable, he looked sedate; behind his spectacles, his eyes glinted from Sheila to me, sharp with merriness and suspicion. He made no secret that he wanted Sheila’s backing for a sum as great as he could persuade out of her, as great as a thousand pounds.

‘I’ve not come here just for the sake of your intelligent conversation,’ he told her. His voice was fluent, modulated, flattering, high-spirited.

‘I mustn’t come on false pretences, must I?’ he said. ‘I warn you, I’m a dangerous man to let into your house.’